Episode 98: The November Men & The Domino Principle

Normally I say, "Watch ___ for yourself and make up your own mind." In this situation, I feel like saying, "I watched this weird sh*t so you don't have to." 😆

+ Could there be a left-wing version of Oswald? What was LBJ getting at when he said the left gets people in different ways? 🤔

+ Is there a shadowy cabal that hires criminals and ne'er-do-wells who are easy to disappear? 

+ Does every pop-pop plot have a real perpetrator and a designated patsy?

The November Men (1993) and The Domino Principle (1977) explore such questions. 

Links:

https://tubitv.com/movies/709483/the-november-men

https://tubitv.com/movies/465011/the-domino-principle-the-domino-killings

Need more? You can visit the website at: https://consaracytheories.com/ or my own site at: https://saracausey.com/. Don't forget to check out the blog at: https://consaracytheories.com/blog. 

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My award-winning biography of Dag is available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

My forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will be available globally next summer. 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Summary:

Sara Causey discusses two low-budget films, "The November Men" (1993) and "The Domino Principle" (1977), on her podcast. "The November Men" follows a filmmaker's obsession with a left-wing presidential assassin, featuring a convoluted plot involving various characters and a final twist revealing it as a film within a film. "The Domino Principle" stars Gene Hackman as a Vietnam veteran coerced into a hit, with a slow-paced narrative and a climactic ending. Both films explore themes of conspiracy, manipulation, and the nature of power, prompting Sara to question the existence of shadowy cabals and the validity of LBJ's assertion about left-wing assassins.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Conspiracy theories, November men, Domino principle, presidential assassination, left-wing plot, right-wing plot, shadowy organization, Gene Hackman, Stanley Kramer, Mickey Rooney, IMDb rating, JFK conspiracy, Secret Service, filmmaker obsession, political assassination.

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will be profiling two, uh, well, maybe not so great films that I watched. One is called the November men, not the November man, which is a Pierce Brosnan movie from some years back. If you Google it, November man is going to pop up. This is the November men, released in 1993 and the domino principle, which was released in 1977 normally, I say, watch whatever for yourself. If you haven't already seen it, download this episode. Bookmark it, come back to it later. But watch this content for yourself and make up your own mind. Come to your own conclusions. Don't just listen to me or take my word for something. Go and check it out for yourself. In this situation, I really feel like saying, Hey y'all, I watch this weird shit so that you don't have to. Yeah, as of this recording, both films are available free of charge on Tubi. I'll give you my standard disclaimer there. I don't control what comes and goes from to be they may still be there or they may be on some other free of charge streaming platform by the time this hits the airwaves. But you know, I, myself, would only watch them for free. The Domino principle I actually saw on TCM, because they ran it one night in the middle of the night, and I DVR it. But yeah, I don't think that I would have been pleased had I paid any actual money for these. But here we go. I'm gonna start first with the November men, as I mentioned, it came out in 1993 and it has, I don't know, I guess, at least, an interesting premise. I had never heard of it before. The reason that I found it was because one night, you know how these stories go for me, I was really tired. The weather outside was gross. There wasn't anything else to do. And I thought about reading, but I was like, I'm just so tired, I don't know that I could even focus on anything. So to be recommended the November men. It was kind of like, hey, because you like all the JFK conspiracy theory stuff, maybe you'll like this. And the write up says something along the lines of a filmmaker notices that people who are left wing never carry out a presidential pop pop so he decides that he will make a movie about it. And the general plot is, what's this guy actually doing? Is he really making some kind of guerilla independent film about presidential pop pops, or is he actually planning to do something himself? It is a B movie, extremely low budget. I think Robert Davi was the only person that I really recognized from anything else. It reminds me I'm gonna date myself. Here it is, what it is, if you remember, if you're in America, and you remember how USA Network used to do up all night, that's how she always did it up all night with Gilbert Godfrey and Ron deshere. I want to say, like probably late 80s through most of the 90s that show was on, and it would just be like 1b movie after another, after another, all night, on Saturday night, if you ever watched up all night, that's this. That's what the November bed reminds me of. Just like something that would have been on up all night back in the day, and you probably would have fallen asleep after 30 minutes. Now, look, that's just my opinion. You may watch it and think that it's fantastic, but my goodness me, I just thought it was kind of kind of out there. But here's the basic plot line of it. It is set amidst the backdrop of, like the 1992 presidential campaign. And so Poppy Bush was the incumbent, and he was getting ready to go to, I don't know, like the RNC or something like that. And so this filmmaker is working from some LBJ quote that presidential pop poppers are always going to be right wing nut jobs, because the left would never do that. The left would never go and get a boom stick and pop pop somebody in broad day. Light the left will still kill you. They'll just find other ways of doing it. They won't do an overt pop pop. So this filmmaker becomes obsessed with that idea, could there really ever be, like a left wing version of Oswald? And his target is going to be Poppy bush, and he's going to make this gorilla film about whether or not some left of center Kook could go after Poppy and be successful. He has this assistant filmmaker lady that's with him most of the time. Apparently they've been on again, off again, lovers that will factor into the plot. Somehow he also finds his sort of Lee Harvey Oswald stand in this guy who's a former Marine. He's been made redundant. He's had to retire early. He didn't want to, and ever since he's retired early, his life has really hit the skids. He has a wife from a foreign country that doesn't speak very much English. Okay, here we go. The Marina Oswald trope. They have a young child, and they bounce around because financially they're on the Skids. He doesn't have a way to really bring in steady income, and they always have more months than money, so they kind of go from like one rat hole apartment to another, and she winds up splitting up with him. She gets tired of the bouncing around. She thinks that he's starting to get kind of kooky, so she leaves him and moves in with an older couple. Hello, we've got, like our roof pain trope here, and the guy becomes increasingly unhinged as he gets further involved with this filmmaker and the filmmakers ideas, he becomes less and less grounded in reality, and you can tell this guy is primed and ready to pop off. The filmmaker also works with several other individuals that kind of loosely fit into the JFK type of story. He hires a woman who's going to pump an umbrella up and down so she's literally going to be like, umbrella man out on a sidewalk. He talks to two Arabic men who say that they hate Poppy bush for what he's done to the Middle East, and they're planning to, like, rig up a toy helicopter with a bunch of explosives. The Lee Harvey Oswald stand in tells them that that's never going to work. There's going to be like a Black Hawk that jams all the signals, and they're convinced that they've got some way to still get their plan going. He also hires a black man, and the black man says, I really feel like I'm being set up as the Patsy. I feel like one of you actually will murder Poppy, and then it'll get blamed on me, because I'm a person of color. So you have this whole like ragtag group of folk that's swarming around this weird movie. In the midst of this, the lady production assistant finds out that the filmmaker is sleeping with another woman, and she goes to the Secret Service and informs them about this weird film and how she thinks that the filmmaker is actually going to do something that he has gone from a film and a fictional setup to the point where he's so obsessed that he's actually going to try To do something to Poppy So then one of their agents becomes an infiltrator, makes up a story that he has AIDS and that he hates Poppy bush and he wants to be part of the film because he has AIDS. The filmmaker very quickly figures out that he's lying through his teeth. So then he makes up a story that, No, he doesn't have AIDS, but he does have a sick child, and he needs the money. He needs to be able to get, like his sag card back, and whatever he goes into his sob story. So the filmmaker is still kind of keeping him at arm's length, and the guy says, Well, I've been filming you anyway, so why don't you let me make like a behind the scenes documentary, and then my film can be like the story behind the story. I'll film you filming the film, and the guy consents to do it again. This is super convoluted and weird, but they finally get to the day there's all this rigmarole, and they finally get to the day where Poppy Bush is going to be in town, and everybody's in their positions. Spoilers here, if you care to watch the movie. I mean, I don't know that I'm really spoiling anything for you, because it's not exactly the world's most groundbreaking cinema. I'm trying to be fairly polite, but yes, it has like a six and a half rating on IMDb, and that might be generous. So the Lee Harvey Oswald stand in gets into place with with a boom stick, and then the the Arabic men get into place in a parking garage, and they murder a security guard, and they are getting their helicopter loaded with. With explosives ready to go. And the filmmaker tries to ambush them. To stop them. They kill him. I think they also kill the lady production assistant, the shush service. Kills the Lee Harvey Oswald stand in. They arrest the umbrella lady. They arrest the black man. And so the whole thing just turns into a bunch of people getting arrested and or murdered at the very end. But then at the end end, you discover that the whole thing was a film, and you see them at a rap party where the cast is like, everybody's drinking and everybody's having fun at this party. And so you find out that it was like a film inside a film inside a film, sort of like Inception. So you have the filmmaker making a film about whether or not somebody on the left would get Poppy bush, and somebody else in the film is filming him, but it's actually a service agent that's pretending to be sick with AIDS, but then he's also pretending that he has a sick kid, but really, he's just filming everything for the government. But then all of that's a sham, because it's actually part of another film within a film, like I'm a headache just even talking about it. So why am I talking about if the film was that lousy. You know, why am I bringing it up here? Because there is an interesting notion is, is this idea of what LBJ was getting at when he said, the left gets at people in different ways. You're never going to have a left winger that does a presidential pop, pop. They just wouldn't do that. They'd figure out another way to eliminate their threat. Is that true? Was he telling you part of their playbook? Now we've had pop poppers, not at a presidential level, but we've had pop poppers and lunatics of any stripe that you can imagine, any side of political orientation, any kind of sexual orientation, any kind of gender orientation. There's, been like, pop poppers galore. It seems like every day you turn on the news and there's some new Pop Pop that's happened somewhere.

But was LBJ telling you, like, hey, look, there's a playbook that they go by if they need a presidential pop popper. It's always going to be a right wing nut job. It's never going to be a left wing nut job. Is that true? Could there ever be a left wing version of Oswald, or is it always going to be the stereotypical right wing nut job? Does every pop, pop plot have a real perpetrator, and then also a designated Patsy? Because we see this in the November men, he's got his Lee Harvey Oswald stand in, and the stand in supposedly is going to keep the Arabic men who actually want to kill Poppy with their weird helicopter thing. Supposedly he's going to kill the Arabic men to keep them from killing Poppy. So he's actually a hero, but nobody believes that, because he gets murdered by the shush service. Anyway. Do all of these plots have some real perpetrator that's actually the one who does the deed and then a designated Patsy? I mean, it seems that way. Which leads me to the next film I'm going to talk about, slightly better, not much, the domino principle, because this is another topic that gets bandied about in that film. So the domino principle, it actually is a more, I guess, what you would call normal Hollywood film, in that it has some actual production value and some actors and actresses that you have seen before. I think right now, it's got an IMDb Rating of 5.7 which is actually lower than the November men. So again, you watch at your own risk, potentially waste two hours of your own life at your own risk. But it stars Gene Hackman as the main guy, the Vietnam veteran. It also has Candace Bergen as his wife. Richard Widmark is in it. Mickey Rooney is in in a super creepy role, and then also Eli Wallach. So it does have some actual actors and actresses, and it was directed, believe it or not, by Stanley Kramer, like this is the same Stanley Kramer who created films like Judgment at Nuremberg and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and Inherit the Wind. I think he also directed Brando and the wild one back in the 50s. So Stanley Kramer has some real chops. Gene Hackman has some real chops. But wow, we Woo, we Wow. It really doesn't come together in the domino principle. So the basic concept here is that Roy Tucker is a Vietnam veteran. He's in jail for murder, and these weird, obtuse guys in business suits show up to the prison, and it's basically like, we'll get you out of here if you agree to do a. Contract hit for us. We're not going to tell you any of the circumstances. You just have to say, yes, you can either rot in jail for the rest of your life and never get out, or you can have your freedom. But the cost of your freedom is you're going to have to murder somebody for us. He winds up taking the deal. Of course, his cell mate is Mickey Rooney, who is like, super perverted all the time. He's just talking about sex. That seems to be the the main thing that he wants to get into. And it's just gross to see, like, Mickey Rooney as an old dude constantly talking about sex. It's just like, Okay, no, thank you. I'm not interested in that. And honestly, Gene hackman's character, Tucker, wasn't interested in any there, which was kind of funny, but they get him out of jail, and he says that he wants Mickey Rooney's character Oscar to go with him. As soon as they get out of the jail, they get some miles down the road, some men they're gonna like switch vehicles to get out of some delivery van. And in the process of switching the vehicles, they kill Oscar, of course, because they feel like he's dead weight. And they abduct Tucker. They set him up in a very nice hotel. He's got a bank account, he has a fake passport, he has credit cards. He has a whole new wardrobe. They're going to allow him to reunite with his wife, and the whole time, they're saying like you're still going to owe us. We're giving you a little taste of freedom, a taste of the good life up front here to keep you on the hook, but when it's time for you to do the deed, you're still going to have to do it. They also tell him not to contact anybody that he knew before he went to jail. Just leave people alone, other than your wife, leave everybody else alone. He gets the idea that he should contact his attorney, and of course, this shadowy organization murders the attorney, and he sees the story about it that night on like The 10 O'Clock News, and it really brings it home to him that he just needs to shut the fuck up and not tell anybody else what he's actually doing. The I would say maybe first hour of the film really drags. The pacing is so slow. And then toward the end, everything just happens, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's like, like, slow, slow, slow. Everything happens at once. The pacing of the film is really not good at all. I don't know how or why that happened, but it's just a little bit of a slog to get through. So they have him practice that he does like a practice run of using a boom stick from a helicopter. And he's a good marksman, and it seems like everything's going well. They have him go after the target from a helicopter. He doesn't want to do it, but he doesn't. And this man, whoever he was, dies, but he knows, like Gene hackman's character, Tucker, knows that something's up because he knows that he didn't actually fire correctly. He intentionally aimed away from the man, but the man died anyway. So his handler, from this shadowy organization tells him we always have more than one person. We would never just have one pop popper. We have to make sure that everything goes well. So we had two other men on the ground to be sure that our target was killed today, then his handler is murdered at the airport in a car bombing. Gene Hackman and his wife get away, but she is killed. She's run over by a car. And then the final scene of the film, we see that his cellmate, Oscar, played by Mickey Rooney, didn't actually die. He's coming back to get Tucker to tie up the loose ends to kill Tucker, but Tucker kills him first. As Tucker, or Gene Hackman, is walking down the beach, we see that he is in the cross hairs of someone else. So there's going to be yet another pop popper that takes care of Tucker, to sort of wrap up the supposed loose ends, and that is how the film ends, yeah, I heard that Gene Hackman really did not like the film, and it wasn't like, if he had to do it over again, he wouldn't have done it. It was just weird. It was, it was an odd film. It had the makings of something really good. What it reminded me of was a poorly done version of the parallax view. But there's still, I think, a good question that we can look at here. Is there a shadowy cabal that hires criminals and ne'er do wells who are easy to disappear, they're easy to pluck, they're easy to manipulate? Late, and then if something goes wrong, or they don't want any supposed loose ends, they just kill them, and that's that they're never heard from again, and nobody goes looking. We see that very clearly in the parallax view. The more that Warren Beatty tries to investigate this corporation, the further entrenched he becomes, and he quickly figures out that it's not a winning game. And by the time that it really sinks in that it's not a winning game, they've set him up for murder. They've set him up to be a patsy. He gets killed, and that's the end of it. So there's a similar theme to that in the domino principle, this shadowy organization, this Cabal, you're never really told much about them, only that they control everything. They make all the big decisions. They're more powerful than the governments. They're more powerful than prime ministers and presidents. They're the ones that really make the rules, and they decide who lives and who dies, and they recruit people that they can very easily manipulate and then dispose of. Is that the way the world works? So in the November man, we have this question, particularly from the LBJ quote, is it just part of the playbook that you would never have a left wing version of Oswald. You're going to always get right wing pop poppers. The left will take care of people differently. They'll still kill you. It'll just be done in a different way. Do we have an organization, a cabal, a corporation, whatever it is that rules the world? Do they take prisoners and criminals and ne'er do wells and people that are easy to just pluck out of society and vanish to do their dirty work. It is, it are? Are we being told something about the way the world really works? I actually think that's entirely possible. I think it's probable. I think it's highly, extremely likely, that that's the way that the world works. So even though these two films are a bit corny, they are the kind of movies that you would watch on a misspent night. On to be are they giving us some ideas of a greater truth, a point to ponder, something to contemplate. Stay a little bit crazy, and I will see you in the next episode.

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